babblings
Friday, June 4, 2010
Do you have any idea how hard it is, when you’re a writer, to convince yourself that every sentence you write doesn’t have to be perfect? I love the soft clicking of the keys as I type away. I love less the sound of silence as my fingers rest on the keys, my brain willing them to write something grand and perfect. Perfect. Really? I love James Joyce. I think he’s a fantastic author. Perfect maybe? There are hordes of people out there who think he couldn’t write if his life depended on it. E.E. Cummings, T.S. Eliot, my favorite poets. Aren’t there people out there who think their writing doesn’t even touch perfection? And yet, to me, what they wrote speaks the language of my heart.
So why do I (I suppose I should speak for myself and not writers at large) obsess over what is perfect? I am bound to write something that I think is utter garbage and that someone else thinks is….yeah, perfect. I do think I should strive to improve my writing, always, but should I not write because it might not be shining gold on the first try? It might be shining gold to someone else. And even if not, the only way to get better is practice. Sitting around and thinking about how much I wish I wrote more, that is not going to get me anywhere. It will lead to more sitting around and thinking. Time that could be spent writing. Or at least outside in the sunshine, or walking, or cleaning, or anything more productive than giving in to a “what if, why can’t” train of thought.
It comes down to action, I suppose. Try. Some might say, there’s no harm in trying. Well, there is. You might fail. It might be really bad. And that could be hard. So yeah, there’s harm in trying. I think the key is, there is more harm in not trying. There is more injury to the soul by letting years go by and never even lifting a finger to accomplish the things your heart so badly wants to accomplish.
It’s hard to make promises, even to yourself, because what if you let yourself down? What if you let others down? It’s scary, it’s a risk, and not many people embrace scary. Can you imagine how much more joy we could have in our lives if we looked scary right in the face, accepted that it was terrifying and allowed our hearts to race and the blood to pump through our veins and just lived?
I have a feeling this blog will be less about writing and more introspective than even you can handle. Funny, this modern generation. We don’t have journals, private things we keep to ourselves. We have public journals, something for strangers, friends, anyone to read. We want to share. Look at Facebook. What is the point of that? Exposing your world to everyone you know. Trying to share a bit of who you are, I think. Neil Gaiman wrote, “Everybody has a secret world inside of them. All of the people of the world, I mean everybody. No matter how dull and boring they are on the outside, inside them they've all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands maybe.” I think that is what all this strange life-sharing is about. Our feeble attempts at sharing our secret worlds.